People never say they want to grow up to be a middle manager, and some company founders aspire never to hire one.

In 2002, Google decided to eliminate managers from its engineering operations. “We were of the attitude, ‘Who needs managers? They never add any value,’ ” Craig Silverstein, the company’s first employee after its co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, told me recently. Mr. Silverstein, who later served as Google’s technology director, said this refrain “mirrored the common stereotype at the time, of managers just adding levels of bureaucracy.”